Section 2

2. There is, obviously, no question here of hands or feet, of
any implement borrowed or inherent: Nature needs simply the Matter
which it is to work upon and bring under Form; its
productivity cannot
depend upon mechanical operation. What driving or hoisting goes to
produce all that variety of colour and pattern?

The wax-workers, whose methods have been cited as parallel to
the creative act of Nature, are unable to make colours; all they can
do to impose upon their handicraft colours taken from elsewhere.
None the less there is a parallel which demands attention:
in the case
of workers in such arts there must be something locked within
themselves, an efficacy not going out from them and yet guiding
their hands in all their creation; and this observation should have
indicated a similar phenomenon in Nature; it should be clear
that this
indwelling efficacy, which makes without hands, must exist in
Nature, no less than in the craftsman- but, there, as a thing
completely inbound. Nature need possess no outgoing force as against
that remaining within; the only moved thing is Matter; there
can be no
moved phase in this Nature-Principle; any such moved phase could not
be the primal mover; this Nature-Principle is no such moved
entity; it
is the unmoved Principle operating in the Kosmos.

We may be answered that the Reason-Principle is, no doubt,
unmoved, but that the Nature-Principle, another being, operates by
motion.

But, if Nature entire is in question here, it is identical with
the Reason-Principle; and any part of it that is unmoved is the
Reason-Principle. The Nature-Principle must be an Ideal-Form, not a
compound of Form and Matter; there is no need for it to possess
Matter, hot and cold: the Matter that underlies it, on which it
exercises its creative act, brings all that with it, or, natively
without quality, becomes hot and cold, and all the rest, when
brought under Reason: Matter, to become fire, demands the
approach not
of fire but of a Reason-Principle.

This is no slight evidence that in the animal and
vegetable realms
the Reason-Principles are the makers and that Nature is a
Reason-Principle producing a second Reason-Principle, its offspring,
which, in turn, while itself, still, remaining intact, communicates
something to the underlie, Matter.

The Reason-Principle presiding over visible Shape is the very
ultimate of its order, a dead thing unable to produce further: that
which produces in the created realm is the living Reason-Principle-
brother no doubt, to that which gives mere shape, but having
life-giving power.